Thursday, September 01, 2016

Eve Online F2P or Unlimited Trial

Eve Online announced a F2P or unlimited trial variant. Basically, you can make a character with a restricted number of skillpoints and skills and play for free. To get a full character, you have to be a subscriber.

It's an interesting choice for Eve. The biggest advantage is that it gives the new player a long time to truly come to grips with the game. Eve is infamous for its learning curve, and now there's no time pressure on learning how to play.

The interesting side will be seeing how the current Eve players abuse this mechanic. At certain levels, Eve is often a numbers game, and now each side can field arbitrarily large numbers. For example, instead of scouting multiple systems in a patrol with a single ship, you could instead station one character per system, and log onto each character in turn.

If I remember correctly, Eve did crack down on multi-boxing, so maybe that will mitigate the effect.

Another concern is that Eve often boasts that a new player can become "useful", even to the major powers, within a few days. But if that new player is useful, surely a couple hundred alpha accounts is even more useful. But if you nerf the usefulness of the alpha accounts, are you not also nerfing the usefulness of the new player?

WoW has an unlimited trial, where you're limited to level 20. But no one cares about level 20s. They're pretty much useless in the greater scheme of things. So there's no need to worry about players (other than gold-sellers) making tons of level 20s.

Will low level characters in Eve become more useless, thus diminishing that selling point?

Edit: Here's another way of putting the issue. I think there are two options:

1. Infinite low level characters
2. Useful low level characters.

I think that these need to be mutually exclusive to be balanced. If you have infinite amounts of useful low level characters, the game is going to break. That means I expect Eve Online to eventually choose Option #1 over Option #2.

9 comments:

Character progression in EVE isn't linear in the same manner as other MMOs, where you're essentially useless at endgame unless you've hit a certain point in progression. In EVE, 5 million SP(what the devs estimate an Alpha clone will max out at), while not truly substantial, is more than enough to be effective in the roles that they are limited to.

One of the things that people who haven't played EVE repeatedly fail to recognize is that EVE is not a traditional MMO. Bigger isn't always better, and in fact, in a lot of cases being "bigger" in the traditional MMO sense is a hindrance. Fleets in EVE can't function without the smaller vessels that Alpha clones are limited to. What's more, logistics cruisers(space priests) can be skilled for and flown adequately by Alpha clones.

TL;DR: comparing EVE's Alpha clones to WoW's level 20 trial is a pointless exercise, unless you're trying to give an example of false equivalence. If you want to compare it to something in WoW, it'd be more like Blizzard letting you get to max level and gear up, but only enough to run LFR.

Perhaps I was not clear enough, but I agree with you. Currently new pilots/Alpha clones are useful. But if they are usefully, doesn't that encourage corps to stash a few thousand Alpha clones and use them as a strategic resource? And thus any corp which doesn't do that is at a disadvantage?

Assuming that is undesirable behavior, CCP can only stop it by making Alpha clones less desirable, which in turn makes new players less desirable.

The link to WoW is that no one cares if a guild has a few thousand free accounts, because level 20s don't matter. If level 20s did matter, having a few thousand free accounts might become important.

I'm not sure about whether the alphas will become useless in the same way that WoW's L20s are. WoW's selling point for years has been that the game begins at max level, so from that perception L20s are useless. It doesn't mean that they're nerfed (except they have no access to heirlooms which puts them at a huge disadvantage in BGs and 5-mans), but that WoW's player base is conditioned to not desire them.

With EVE Online's alphas, I'm more of the opinion that they're a bit closer to LOTRO or SWTOR F2P accounts, but with restrictions in the skill points in addition to any other "external" restrictions (bank space, etc.). I can see the major powers taking advantage of these alphas as both cannon fodder and in the same way that an army makes use of scouts and patrols. in advance of the main force. Sure, the ships aren't going to be able to go head to head with the big boys, but they won't be expected to. They can attempt to employ zerg rush tactics against other fleets with tons of alphas joining in without requiring tons of subs.

As an aside, WoW fixed heirlooms in low-level PvP. All characters have a fixed stat template in battlegrounds, so having heirlooms is no longer a huge advantage. I wish they would do the same thing for low level dungeons.

The main problem of alpha accounts is that they are worthless to the owner, so they can be used for openly forbidden ways. Sure they get banned, but who cares.

For example a single players can tip the battle with botted ECM ships and then CCP can either undo the whole battle making the legitimately playing winners mad or accept the battle result and make the cheat victims mad. If they go with the second, than soon everyone will use ECM-bots to support their fleet. If they go with the first, than soon everyone will use ECM bots to support the ENEMY fleet when they are losing to force CCP to undo the battle.

Low level characters are not useless. As it stands today, an Alpha clone pilot would be much, much, much more useful in New Eden than a level 20 unlimited trial character is in Azeroth. But there is a danger that, in closing down any exploitable loopholes, CCP might make them unattractive to new players. And since the real point for CCP is to get new players into the game (as opposed to getting every vet to make a couple more alt accounts, as will surely happen) the plan is fraught with peril.

You can't log in more than one alpha, and while I'm sure some people will find a way around that (those will be the people who also have full time EVE accounts, so they will have something to lose), diminishing returns still kick in. People with 10+ accounts today don't bring 10+ capital ships to a fight, and even doing something like multiboxing PvE has been impacted by the removal of the more passive methods (drone stuff). Plus someone who takes the time to setup a 20+ pilot auto-mining fleet isn't going to limit themselves to alpha efficiency, not when an omega will get them a PLEX and more in the same amount of time.

So when you say an alliance will stash thousands of alpha clones, who is actually going to fly them? Because for every human behind an alpha, its one less human behind an omega pilot who is far more efficient, even in exactly the same ship/role.